Tardis
by Captain Oblivious
Summary: Roundabout Reunion fic with a scattering of adventure. At the end of Doomsday, I heard something wrong, and more Tylers on the way became something else entirely. And my brain ran with it. Obviously PostDoomsday, Nine, Ten, the Tylers, etc. Enjoy!
1. Introduction

**Tardis**

**By Captain Oblivious**

**Style: **This one is actually written like a very long summary. The one-shots to follow will fill out the story and characters and relationships more, but 'Tardis' is really just an overview of the entirety of a season and story.

**Idea:** Based entirely on a misunderstanding on my part at the end of Doomsday. "More Tylers on the way" became something else entirely… and then my brain ran.

**Disclaimer:** While I don't own the Doctor or anything related to him, I do love him dearly in all his forms. Hence why I would never do anything to either discredit him or his creators.

I hope you enjoy my little world!

* * *

She gnawed on her bottom lip as she yanked the cortex converter out of its socket and scanned the conductor for any damage. Satisfied, she jammed it back in and fiddled with the dial next to it to make sure the energy would once more be directed through the converter. It immediately lit up, the change readily visible… right up until it gave off a skin-searing spark and shorted out. 

"Damn it," she hissed, sticking her thumb in her mouth.

"Told you she wouldn't like that," came a smug voice from above her head, its northern accent implying a long-suffering eyeroll.

"Look," she called, voice muffled because of the thumb in her mouth, "if I don't get this sorted out, neither of us is going anywhere." There was silence from above. "And as you aren't in the mood to take care of it yourself," she could easily sense him mimicking her silently, "I'm trying to do what I can with a machine whose controls I can't read because you've forgotten to update the translator's circuit anytime in the last 370 years, and it's finally buggered on you!"

The pause before he chose to reply was filled with the residual sparks of the converter. "You done?" he called.

She sighed, pulled her thumb out of her mouth, and stared at it, hoping it wasn't as burned as it looked. "S'pose, yeah."

"Well then it _might_ interest you to know that for the last 2 hours, you've been working on the converter that allows the TARDIS to disguise itself, and that that circuit has, in fact, been broken and nigh unfixable for longer than either of us'd care to think."

There was another long pause as she stared at the converter.

"_Damn it_!"


	2. Tardis

Her name was really what did it for most people. When you met the daughter of the head of Torchwood, that was enough to make you wary. Add on top of that the uncanny knack for piecing together alien technology and the secretive smile she always wore when she finally had, and you at least were well aware of the fact that she was… _different_. But when you heard her name… that was what really pushed everyone over the edge, and she ended up with a wider berth and more freedom within the company than even her father.

Pete Tyler was strange to no one. The whole world knew about his health drinks, and if you worked at Torchwood, you knew that the health drinks were really just a cover for him while he worked away at protecting the earth. It was an old story, one that didn't even really interest the new recruits. He was the head of the company, and that was that.

He had garnered some interest when he'd brought his long-lost daughter to work one day. Rose was at least 20, looked like her mum, and talked about aliens more matter-of-factly than anyone they'd ever seen. Including the aliens. She'd spotted the Slitheens from a mile away, named a planet that had a name far too long for anyone to remember… while everyone else was scrambling for their AK-47s, she'd calmly filled a water pistol with vinegar and had at it. But just as suddenly as she'd shown up, she had disappeared a few years later. Pete had appeared haggard and over-stressed for a couple of weeks after that, but when asked where Rose had gone, he'd just smiled ruefully and said she'd simply gone away.

But the mystery that was Rose Tyler was eventually buried for the most part, and people forgot to wonder about her odd disappearance. Whatever oddities lay in Rose, after all, were magnified in her sister.

The youngest Tyler was born nearly a year after the rift between universes was closed, and had never had any illusions about her life. Her dad protected the world from aliens. Her mum was from another universe and, given twenty years, still couldn't remember the name of Raxacoricofallapatorious. Her sister, Rose, had a different dad who was the same person, and was in love with an alien who she would never see again. Her 'uncle' Mickey was a brilliant idiot. What was most important about her life, however, was what she was raised to be.

She became resourceful like her dad, always making connections and drawing conclusions from unlikely places. Torchwood was never what you might call 'child friendly,' and especially in the case of such a precocious little girl, the department heads were particularly wary. She proved more than a little curious, constantly winding up with some mystery alien illness, or else transported halfway across the country because she'd touched something in the warehouse. It was for this reason that she had a tracking chip imbedded in her left arm, carried a cell phone on her at all times from the age of four, and was widely considered lucky to be alive.

She was prized nonetheless, because you couldn't help but instinctively understand her importance in the grand scheme of things. Her natural acceptance of alien life wasn't surprising, especially after meeting Rose, who had had her under her wing since before she could walk. Her mechanical and technological know-how came from being around Mickey Smith for so much of the time since she'd been born. She was the opposite of passive, and that, she got from her mother.

She was also spastically inattentive, and no one had any idea where that came from. Her brain simply seemed to run ahead of her at times, so that she would have twenty new projects running at the same time, and be bouncing from one to the next with energy that seemed humanly impossible. Then again, she was prone to falling asleep in the most unlikely of places and in the most unlikely of times, so that the myth of her boundless energy was soon put to rest.

Beyond what the people at Torchwood saw, she knew there was much more to her life. She had been raised by everyone around her to be the best, but to her, what was much more important was how her sister had directed this future.

Rose had been in love with a man called the Doctor, who was both a genius and a lunatic. By all appearances, she knew she would never see him again, but this had not stopped her from using him as a backdrop for her sister's upbringing. In the five short years that the girls had with each other, Rose had impressed upon the younger girl the Doctor's method of acting and reacting. She had regaled her sister with stories of the time that she had spent with him, and in the end, had influenced the little girl so much that she grew up knowing exactly what her mission in life was. Even after Rose had disappeared, she went on following in that direction, essentially working hard at making sure that, if the Doctor ever did happen to crop up again, she would be someone that he would like.

Years later, when she found herself under the stares of three rather alarmed people, she reflected gratefully on all aspects of her childhood, from Rose raising her for the Doctor, to Jackie insisting that she attend _normal_ grammar and secondary schools so that Torchwood would not be the only source of her social upbringing.

"Of all the…" one of those alarmed people sputtered, waving a hand at her as if she were supposed to continue the sentence, and then whipping it around to jab a finger at the redheaded woman who'd shouted at her just before. "You! You and her, and…." He went on waving his arms around, mouth working wordlessly at some times, spouting angry half-sentences at others.

She laughed good-naturedly, the quick brush-down of her jumper the only sign of timidity. Sticking out her hand and grinning with glittering eyes up into that unfamiliar chocolate gaze, she introduced herself enthusiastically.

"I'm Tardis," the brown eyes narrowed in the slightest, "Tardis Tyler." And then they widened.

It was always the name that got people.


	3. Regeneration

Matter cannot be created or destroyed. So when you apply that to regeneration, when every single cell is replaced, you have to wonder where the other cells go. When it comes to the Doctor, he exists so close to the edge of space and time, that with that final blast of regeneration (which is meant to push those cells out of existence to make way for the new ones), the cells are pushed past existence itself – through the Void, as it were. Experience has proven that one must be bound to existence to be contained in the Void. Case in point: the Dalek prison. Thus, while the Doctor all put together exists definitely, atomized and shoved over the edge of time and space, he cannot be bound. Therefore, he simply slips through.

But when he reaches the edge of the Void and begins to enter the next universe, that was when things with Nine became more interesting than with his previous regenerations. With those that entered the Void before him, they simply slipped through and then died on the other side. Their wounds did not disappear with reassembly. Their bodies simply reappeared in a world where no one knew them, and they were given the same treatment as any John Doe's dead body might. So regeneration, really, became the death of the Doctor in that state. Of his body, anyway.

Things with Nine, however, went a bit hinky. While his atoms were blasted away into inexistence like usual, the individual cells and their death were not quite the same. The Doctor had died of many things. He had never, however, died from Time. And, quite inconveniently (or conveniently, depending on how you looked at it), Time was one of those things that bound you to existence, and could have kept him stuck in the Void forever… had the Time been a _part_ of his cells, instead of clinging to them. That tiny little fact was what saved him in the end. The Void held onto Time, as it does, causing it to vanish from everything. It was drawn from the cells (which didn't, in fact, _exist_), separating existence from nothingness, until his death was left in the Void, and he was left in sailing, inexistent Doctor bits.

He passed into the parallel universe, as all his previous forms had done, but left his death behind.

The universe requires that all cells account for themselves, and so if new cells that enter it are meant to be together, the universe will make it so. Thus, the unconscious (naked) body of a man was found floating past a quaint town along the Thames. It was not long before John Smith exhibited an extraordinary amount of medical (not to mention various other forms of) knowledge for someone with acute amnesia. How Tardis began to understand how this all happened is anyone's guess, but when her hypothesis had been properly formed, and her John Smith had shown the appropriate signs to verify it, she decided to work at his memory in earnest.


	4. John Smith

A/N: Just a quick note: I'm going out of town for the weekend, so review replies will be slightly delayed. I hope to have _lots_ of reviews to answer, though. Hint hint. ;)

Glad so many of you seem to be enjoying it thus far. One thousand hits in less than two weeks is quite a feat for such a short story!

* * *

She had been thirteen when she'd found him. There was something in the way he observed his surroundings, in the heavy lilt of his voice, in the way his ears stuck out and made him look slightly daft. "What do you do?" she'd asked him.

"I'm a doctor," he'd said, and from then on, they'd been coffee shop friends. He made snarky comments about patients and coworkers who were idiots, and she'd told him about Torchwood, the secret company dedicated to protecting the earth from aliens, without hesitation. For two years, it was an easy companionship, neither bothering to address the odder circumstances surrounding their relationship.

And then, one day, Jackie saw him and pitched a fit to level the neighborhood. She'd slapped him and Tardis had laughed at the look on his face. He had been confused by what Jackie was accusing him of, finally yelling right back, "Jackie Tyler, you bloody domestic, don't you start in on me. I've never even _touched_ your daughter!" To which Jackie swelled up and Tardis shoved herself in-between the two, introducing him proper civilly to her mother as Doctor John Smith, who was not the same as Rose's Doctor, and could she please not kill him, as she quite liked his company?

This incident had thrown their easy friendship so out of balance that she didn't see him for nearly six months, until one day, Pete came home with the news that they'd hired a new researcher who had more promise than the rest of the Torchwood teams put together. He'd then turned to Tardis, who was piecing together a replicator as if she'd seen one before, and asked how it came to be that this new recruit, this John Smith, had been so intimately familiar with Torchwood's inner workings. She'd grinned and showed him how to work the replicator.

The next day, she skived off of school and showed John the ropes. He dumped three months' work in the bin with a few well-chosen words, and everyone finally began to really wonder about the Tyler family.

She was seventeen when she'd known for sure what he was. Something was going on down in Cardiff, and as John pointed out, it unfortunately looked as if it was connected to several other occurrences previously thought to be separate. She mentioned Bad Wolf under her breath, and before Mickey could chuckle at her reference, the doctor had gone rigid and snapped at her for joking about the situation. Angry to have the enjoyment of her sister's memory cut short, she snapped back, and they'd begun yelling at each other until Mickey had tried to get them to stop by waving a hand in the other man's face and shouting, "Oi, Big Ears!"

John didn't look angry anymore. He looked exasperated. "Look, Rickey the Idiot, if you hadn't opened the TARDIS, we wouldn't be in this mess. Now _shove off_!"

She sliced her hand on an alien artifact before anyone had time to react to his outburst (conveniently picking up yet another alien virus that turned the area purple and shrank the big toe on her left foot). It was the first slip-up of many, and they were only lucky enough to have a small audience for the next week. Before anyone started asking questions, Tardis told Pete that she had a project that she needed John's expertise on, and she needed it exclusively. As always, Pete let her have what she needed, and John didn't ask questions.

She passed her other projects on to the more creative of the R&D teams, had some vaguely interrelated extraterrestrial devices moved into the wing that had been sectioned years ago and dubbed the 'Ghost Wing.' By the end of the week, they'd spread their gadgetry all throughout the room at the end of the wing, and were working away dutifully.

Then, Tardis began her own experiments. Years later, John asked her how the hell she'd managed to work it out.

And she explained her Regeneration Theory.

For several weeks, she found that his memories could only be accessed by accident, and so she left him without the knowledge of their true project for the time being. The Ghost Room never seemed to bother him, except that the mascara smudge left on the back wall seemed to unnerve him, and so Tardis knew that his memories would never stretch past Satellite Five, but that his instincts were still enough to help him recognize signs of his own disastrous touch.

Because Rose had told her all that she knew about the Doctor by the time she was four, Tardis had recognized John immediately. Call it luck or instinct that the combination of eyes, nose, ears, northern accent, and doctor had caught her attention that day at the coffee shop, but once she'd actually struck up a friendship with him, she'd easily spotted the characteristics that had so defined him to his companion all those years ago.

He didn't remember anything of it, understandably. When he'd woken up, he had set out to find his own identity. He hadn't found it, of course, because he'd never existed before. He had no family, no job, no home… not even a credit line. But then, as a sort of echo of the Doctor, John Smith didn't allow his lack of existence to deter him. Tardis met him fifteen years after he'd first appeared, and the dreams had begun not long after that.

It took a while to piece his memories together. Having none of the previous regenerations to start with, it was completely blind that she'd begun prodding his memory. The best bits came when he was fired up about something, but she could only provide as many scientific mysteries for him to triumph over and pick so many fights. Mostly, she set something in front of him that would absorb his attention, and then asked him things that John Smith did not know. In two weeks, she could not count the amount of times that he'd begun to say "my friend Jack" or "my granddaughter Susan" and then trailed off. He could ramble about an alien race or a sonic cheese grater or bananas until he turned blue, but when he began to mention an old friend, his mind came off of his project to properly remember them… and found that he couldn't. "Hm," he'd say. "I dreamed about that once."

He dreamed about a lot of things, she found, and he'd dreamt about them for years. It wasn't until she'd brought in a picture of Rose that he thought anything about those dreams. Four years of similarly themed dreams, after all, began to lose their significance.

That picture, though… "Rose Tyler," he'd said before Tardis could tell him who she was, and he said it with such conviction and admiration, that neither of them could ignore the coincidences anymore. So, months after they'd begun their 'project,' Tardis finally explained what it actually was, including his memories.

Memory is not inscribed in cells, after all. It might leave the vague imprint, proving that it's been there, but it is not truly there – an echo, in itself. John was rebuilding the memories, she thought, and that was why it was taking so long and remained so elusive. All he needed, really, was a catalyst, and that, Tardis was now sure, was Rose.

He stared at the picture more than he thought she knew. And it was not long before he remembered it all.


	5. Garbage Can

A/N: 1450 hits as of posting. Holy hell, people, you are _incredible_!

* * *

As a present to themselves for having successfully completed their project, they'd gone out for chips, and ended up spending the day wandering the city, both seeing it now with new eyes. It was then that Tardis explained what she knew of Rose's fate to John, and why she'd found it so important to help him unlock his memories. 

"You think her disappearance has something to do with the Doctor," he'd stated, and Tardis had little else to do but nod. He raised the same questions she had once asked herself. Why would Rose have left without saying good-bye? If the only time travel ship in existence was in another universe, how could he, John, go back to find Rose? Even if he did manage that, he wasn't the same Doctor anymore, truly, and Rose would therefore be unhappy with only an echo of the man she once knew. But Tardis was positive that Rose would only have left so suddenly if the Doctor had come for her, and thus there was some obvious work to be done.

And John Smith, being an echo of his previous self and having the same drive to discover and learn, accepted this reasoning as a good beginning to a grand adventure. He'd waggled his hand at Tardis in a gesture so familiar to her from Rose's stories that she'd nearly rocketed her hand to meet his. They'd turned the corner, grinning from ear to ear at each other…

… and nearly ran into the blue police box that had blocked their way. They were both too shocked at first to notice anything except the fact that it was _there_, after John raced in a circle around it and Tardis stared up at the light on top, they both came down to stare at the plain envelope that was taped to the door.

John seemed to only be able to stare at the box in what appeared to be something akin to horror, so Tardis was the one to step forward and rip the envelope open at one end. Two plain silver keys spilled out into her hand, and wedged inside the envelope, she found a plain piece of paper. Someone had scribbled something on the inside.

_I won't bore you with the rather spectacular details of my particularly genius plan_, she read aloud, _but suffice it to say that I am ever so brilliant, thank you very much. Anyway, thought this might help. She's getting near the end of her life, so don't dawdle. There should be enough left in her to get you where you need. Now, get to it! Hop to it, in fact, if you can. Allons-y!_ Tardis paused for a moment, trying to let her brain catch up before she read the last bit.

_P.S. Tardis, tell me about this when you see me, and tell me it's like Bill and Ted's garbage can. If I'm very clever – and I know I am – I'll be able to figure out the rest. In fact, I _have _figured it out, so thank you in both advance and reminiscence for telling me. Cheers!_

The two only stared at each other for one long moment. The next moment, they were charging through the doors of the ship for which Tardis was named.


	6. Rift

A/N: And to think I took so long posting this chapter because I was looking for a quote that I couldn't remember… thanks to The Chibis Are Stalking Me for helping with that, and hooray for the Doctor and Jo Grant!

2150 hits. You're all lovely. :)

* * *

The truth of the matter was that neither Tardis nor John had any idea where to start, and so they simply set to work familiarizing themselves with their new-old ship. John in particular spent a great deal of time being welcomed back by whatever life the ship had, sitting for hours in the captains chair and reveling in it while Tardis worked at learning the technology and trying to repair what burnt out switches and wires and circuits that she could find. 

"_Well then it might interest you to know that for the last 2 hours, you've been working on the converter that allows the TARDIS to disguise itself, and that that circuit has, in fact, been broken and nigh unfixable for longer than either of us'd care to think."_

"_Damn it!"_

It wasn't until John started fiddling around with the monitor on the console that they found something particularly compelling.

"S'there supposed to be evidence of recent Rift activity in the Centaurus A galaxy?" John called to her.

"What do I know about Centaurus A?" she called back, but she pulled off her (new) workman's gloves and joined him at the monitor. "She said that he'd closed up all the gaps, though, so I doubt it's _supposed_ to be there." That brought up an entirely new project, which only made the two more excited. The Rose Project was set aside to compile scenarios about the Rift for all of two seconds, until Tardis had pointed out that from some point of view, you could say that any activity in the Rift would have something to do with Rose. And so, they had slammed the loose panels back into place, test-driven the TARDIS to their homes to pack, and to Torchwood to upload every bit of information they had about the Rift to the TARDIS's memory banks, and had shot off to the galaxy called Centaurus A.

The traces of activity, they'd found, were very old, and therefore hardly helpful. Another trace was found further off, and in several different time periods. They could hardly help running into trouble in some of the places they followed the traces to, and what began as a simple research trip soon turned into a full-blown adventure, and Tardis was treated to a life with a Doctor of her own, while John was given those precious links to a life that was previously gone forever.

It took years to put the evidence they gathered together into any cohesive order, but at last, they formed a theory. What they'd found were not open holes, or even scars of the Rift. Instead, they appeared to be simple ripples in the fabric of space and time, shimmers really, that lasted anywhere between two to fifteen minutes, and because they existed at the edge of both space and time, it didn't seem to matter whether you were in the year when the universe began, or five-billion-apple-something-or-other. The ripple existed.

That was why it took them so long to compile information, in the end. They had to travel in a sort of real time.

The trick with the ripples was that they weren't so much ripples as they were freakishly undulating, ginormous waves in the fabric of space and time, and as such, they were largely unpredictable. With some practice, they'd figured out how to easily (in a very complicated, intricate, delicately handled way) predict the next occurrence of those ripples up to a month before. Getting your signal to penetrate the waves in just the right way, so that it wouldn't be scrambled or even touched, however, was downright _hard_.

In the end, it was what John smugly informed her was "Time Lord technology" that got the first signal through. You had to shorten whatever you were sending into a singular wave and thus, whatever you had on the inside was bigger than the wave on the outside. It was, quite simply, "dimensionally transcendental."

They worked tirelessly to construct the means of transporting a human through the ripples and into the next universe, drifting out in the middle of somewhere or other while they argued over who would go through to test it out. In the end, it was Tardis who stepped over to the spot near the wall that they'd cleared of anything that wasn't nailed down. If the first try wasn't successful, after all, someone would need to find out why and fix it before sending Rose through, and Tardis would hardly fly the TARDIS better than she could fly of her own volition.

Tardis was packed and ready days before John allowed her to push the correct buttons and flip the right levers and twist the right knobs and wind the right wheels to compress herself. He said he was adding the finishing touches to the monitor that would accompany her and allow her to send transmissions back through to let him know she'd made it, but she caught him on several occasions nowhere near the monitor, and suspected after a while that he was really just making sure that the compression was as painless as possible. There was an unfamiliar crease in the middle of his forehead that hadn't been there before. And when it came down to the moment when she slung her pack over her shoulder and found herself lifted off her feet as the compression began, she decided that she was very grateful that he'd thought of it.

Because you did have to fit the outside around the inside, and that proved to be quite uncomfortable when you got down to it.

* * *

I haven't said it much in this one, but reviews do mean quite a bit to me :) Plus, I answer them all, so it's fun to meet new people.

* * *


	7. The Doctor

A/N: As a special treat because the last chapter took so long to post... another chapter! Yey!

I must assume that you are not reviewing because you have nothing nice to say and have thus chosen to stay silent... or else you're like me and LOVE THIS FIC, but only review on the random very special occasion. Or when you see a 32-chapter fic and decide to read it in one sitting and review every single chapter just for the heck of it. waves at The Chibis Are Stalking Me I hope the chibis don't plague me tonight...

And now, without further ado... we start getting down to it, only to discover that we're 4 chapters away from The End.

* * *

The air around her seemed to rumble, vibrating as if someone were grabbing it by the shoulders and shaking it. As she began to rise in the air, she realized that she could not hear John anymore. A light blinded her, and she looked around wildly for a star before remembering that there wasn't one. The light became brighter, turning everything stark white; she squeezed her eyes shut, curling into a ball. The feeling of being in a shaken canister intensified and the roaring seemed as if it would split her ears…

… and then she had fallen painfully onto a familiar grated decking, the roaring and the light and the shaking completely gone. Her pack kept her from rolling over onto her back, so she lay still for a moment, face pressed into the grating, gathering her bearings enough to finally direct them toward her surroundings. Grate, yes. Coral, organic walls, yes. Brown-haired pretty boy, yes. Two companions… ah, well. Not everything could've been expected.

The moment passed, and after her first glance-around, she sprang to her feet with that boundless energy and ripped her bag open, plunging both her head and her hand inside and rooting around, throwing things that got in her way over her shoulder. Jacket, tool kit, pink flamingo (why the hell had he thought she'd need _that_?), hat rack… "Aha!" she cried, snatching the monitor from a deep corner and reemerging from the bag in triumph.

Hardly seeming to notice the other people, one of whom had definitely begun shouting at her, Tardis sprinted to the center console, pried open the proper hatch, and with a tremendous yank, ripped several wires loose. "Oi!" more than one of the others yelled, but as the ship hardly did more than sputter in surprise at her violence, one held the other two back.

Faster than anyone who didn't know the ship could have done, she'd wired her monitor in and flipped it on. When John's anxious face flickered into view, Tardis leapt in the air and whooped. The echo of an excited yell coming from the monitor was evidence that John was responding similarly. Tardis threw herself at the monitor, noting that the edges were already beginning to static. "Go!" she cried, grinning as widely as she could. "Go and get her, and I'll see you soon. _We did it, John!_"

"All right, now remember what I told you about that circuit. If you don't line it up perfectly, you're not going to be able to do this the other way without opening the Void." His voice was beginning to crackle and the static had crept over his face, but she still took the time to roll her eyes.

It wasn't until the monitor had gone completely black with a small pop that the easy companionship that had always connected the two seemed to fade away, leaving Tardis, for the first time since she could remember, feeling very alone. With a huff and a pat to the monitor, she turned at last to the alarmed, sputtering Doctor and his two companions, poking her tongue out the side of her mouth for a moment as she regarded them.

"_I'm Tardis. Tardis Tyler."_


	8. The Companions

A/N: Not sure about this one... oh well. We'll just say there's room for improvement.

3050 hits! I'm utterly amazed.

* * *

Despite its hundreds of rooms, the TARDIS made its discomfort with so many passengers known by plunging them all down to Cardiff for a recharge and refusing to leave until Donna and Martha decided to budge off for a visit home with their families. In the meantime, Tardis dragged the Doctor off to her favourite Cardiff tea house to go over the mechanics of the next while. When Martha and Donna arrived back and heard the bit about the possibility of years, they got a little tiffy.

"Blunderin' about the galaxy…"

"Universe," Tardis corrected.

"Universe, lookin' for these holes…"

"Ripples."

"Ripples in this Void…"

"Time and space, actually. The Void doesn't actually exist in universes…"

"You bloody well better shut your gob a'fore I shut it for ya," Donna threatened finally.

Tardis made a bit of a show out of pressing her lips together, though it was more to hide her grin than to shut up.

"And you," Donna shouted, turning to jab a finger at the Doctor, who immediately threw up his hands in protest.

"Oi, don't go off in a strop," Martha interjected, and Tardis started giggling.

Donna rounded on her, but Tardis mimicked the Doctor and threw up her hands in her defense. "Look," she said quickly, "that's what it's gonna take to get Rose back to the Doctor. And if I know the Doctor like I think I do (and I do, because John practically _is_ him, and I _know_ John), then nothing's going to stop him from doing whatever it takes. Provided, of course," she shot a glance over at the Time Lord in question, "that it doesn't cause both universes to collapse."

The Doctor was watching her quietly with that pensive look that Tardis knew so well on John, and when he finally did speak, his voice reflected the exhaustion of nine hundred years of pain. "What was the last thing I said to her?" he asked. _Prove it_, was his silent challenge.

Even despite the solemn situation, Tardis's mouth twitched with her most joyful grin, as it often did when she spoke of Rose. "You said her name," she told him. "But you didn't finish what you meant." The Doctor's mouth curled upward as they shared a knowing look.

"She knew," the Doctor said, pride buoying his words.

"She knew," Tardis acknowledged.

Before they knew it, the TARDIS had announced itself ready to go, and Donna and Martha had decided to stay behind. They made their polite excuses and were friendly despite it all, but when it finally came down to it, as Donna said, "this is a search for a woman we don't know that could take fifty-seven years, for all we've heard. So you go and find Rose, and when you do, you come back and find us. I wanna meet the woman who captured the Doctor's heart."

"Hearts," Tardis corrected.

Donna narrowly avoided a huff. "Hearts, then."

Tardis grinned happily.

"Oh, and besides," Donna said, nodding at Tardis, "I just don't like you. No offense."

Tardis smirked like she'd seen John do. "That's all right. I'm sort of an acquired taste, 'specially to the terrestrial sort."

"Oi, I like ya just fine!" Martha exclaimed.

"Yeah," Tardis said. "But you're abnormally cool. Personally, I think Rose'll like you"

Before Martha could reply, the Doctor shouted, "GROUP HUG!" and proceeded to mash them all close together, and there really wasn't one that wasn't pleased.


	9. Chasing

A/N: Sorry for the few days' delay. Got a bit sidetracked this weekend. Here we are, though... chapter 9-ish. You'll notice the signifiance of the next chapter's number when I post it. Actually I'll tell you now: it's "Chapter 10 -- Rose." If you happen to get it, let me know :) I'll send some jelly baby love your way.

Thank you all SO much for your encouraging reviews:)

* * *

It took a year and a half to find a ripple that was the right size, and the time she spent with the Doctor was strangely lonely. It wasn't so much that it wasn't exciting or that they didn't have adventures or get along famously… but it _was_ that it simply wasn't the right mix. Tardis couldn't help but envy Rose on that point. No matter who she was with, Rose had managed to fit, which explained why so many people felt drawn to her – even fell in love with her.

Hell, even a Dalek crumbled under the strength of her compassion.

Tardis had no qualms about her own significance in the world, but she did at times feel dwarfed and tiny in the presence of her sister's memory. Rose had told her for years about the Doctor, never seeming to recognize her own importance in the tales. Now, with her echo humming in the TARDIS, with the Doctor bouncing with newfound hope (though she suspected he fairly bounced anyway), and a visit to Jack Harkness (_Captain_ Jack Harkness, thanks), who kissed everyone in sight and nearly beat down the door of the TARDIS because he wanted to come too, Tardis couldn't understand how Rose had managed to belittle her own role. And she'd begun to understand why Martha and Donna had _really_ taken their leave of absence. Individual quality had nothing to do with it. You could be the most brilliant, witty, beautiful person in any universe ever (and the Doctor would argue that by saying that, you were really just talking about him). In this universe, with these people, you would still pale in comparison to the common, bleached-blonde, caked-on-make-up-wearing chav who'd never done her A-levels.

The Doctor, while enthusiastic and over friendly, kept himself carefully detached from her, and after all, she wouldn't blame him. She dismissed it as a by-product of her similarities to her sister, but in the end, she couldn't help but wonder that if she had found a John in his Tenth form, he wouldn't have liked her. Looking for an example in Rose was no help, as she got along with everyone well enough as said. Tardis knew the Doctor watched her at times, and she wasn't surprised. She had Rose's big eyes, expressive eyebrows, and wide mouth. She hadn't bothered with styling her hair, though, being far too busy as a child (and now, as an adult) to care. It was tied out of her face in a no-nonsense way, and it was much darker than Rose's. Her face wasn't nearly as round.

These were all characteristics that she knew the Doctor had mentally checked off in an effort to differentiate. She had a tendency to nag like her mother, though. Years as Pete's daughter, and more arguments with John than she could count, had taught her to clamp her mouth shut as much as possible when the urge struck, but all too often she found herself nagging away at the Doctor. She'd been accused of being Jackie's daughter by John enough that when the Doctor finally blurted it out one day, she knew to take it as an insult rather than delude herself for the next couple of weeks.

And deluding herself was something that Tardis was very good at. While, all in all, she and the Doctor became friends, there was something, some catalyst in their relationship that was missing. This was exactly what Tardis dismissed with an easy explanation. She was happy, and she enjoyed the Doctor's company. She accepted his superficial friendship at face-value, and thus, they both had a blast with each other.

It took seventeen months in total for them both to full realize the consequences of a failed transfer, of never finding the right ripple. Unlike Rose, she would not be able to pull her affections onto the next model relatively easily. She missed _John_, and she was far too much a cross between her mother and Donna to even remotely resemble Rose in the Doctor's eyes. As much as Rose had been unable to label her relationship with the Doctor (for even 'soul mates' couldn't quite cut it), Tardis found herself equally unable to label the… comfortable uncomfortableness that she found herself happily occupying with the Doctor. For a while, she'd settled on brother as a sort of safety net, but that always sat uncomfortably with her. It was more as if he belonged to someone else… someone else's brother? No. More off-limits romance-wise. Eventually she had slapped a large "Brother-in-Law" on it and called it quits. They were siblings-in law… without the balancing presence of the connecting sibling.

No sooner had she done so, than one of their adventures had had a mishap that had turned things to fatal, and when Tardis came to some days later, she and the Doctor had taken a long time-out and simply stared at each other.

Under different circumstances, they might have been the best of friends. But this relationship was one, they were realizing, that had a definite end.

And they'd both grown tired of waiting for it.


	10. Rose

A/N: So sorry about the wait. The Month from Hell and the Paper of Doom have been demanding my attention. A month until the end of the semester, people. One month!

Note the very strategic aligning of chapter numbers and chapter titles :) If you catch my drift, then I think you'll like my attention to detail. :D One more chapter, and 'Tardis' will be complete, and the one-shots will be begin to be posted.

Without further ado, I give you: Rose.

* * *

Energy and tension in the TARDIS grew as That Day neared and began to take form. The ship seemed to fairly quiver with anticipation while Tardis and the Doctor cleared away the space needed and prepared for the coming event, even helping on the random occasion by revealing cargo holds and sporadic cupboards for storing the removed items. Tardis occasionally rubbed her middle, responding to phantom pains of their last, most fatal adventure. She had been surprised when one day, roughly a week before That Day came, she realized that she was just as excited to return to John and Torchwood as she was to finally bring Rose back to the Doctor. He'd been content to be a normal doctor for fifteen years. Surely a few with Torchwood and in the TARDIS wouldn't have completely revived his need to keep roaming, dragging domestic with him from galaxy to galaxy without realizing it. Oh, what grand adventures they would have! 

They hardly slept the night before That Day dawned. Spastic checks to the monitor showed the beginnings of a ripple, but for hours, it was not enough to get excited about. The wait seemed so long, that eventually they both began to become worried. They couldn't risk a transmission through an unstable ripple, knowing that if it wasn't wide enough to accept the transmission, the ripple could catch at an edge and tear into a rift, allowing for the entrance of anything in the Void that wanted to come out.

It was approximately 4:23 in the afternoon (though one could never be quite sure when traveling on the TARDIS. The clock in the Time Room that was tuned into the general time in Cardiff, however, still read 4:23, with the second hand a bit past three-quarters of the way through it's cycle) when the monitor gave off a shrill beep, the 5-minute warning of a fair sized ripple. Tardis sprang out of the captains chair and hefted her pack over a shoulder, and the Doctor darted out of the room, returning a moment later with a ridiculously excited grin stretching across his face.

"I've got a present for you!" he said brightly, pulling a bit of wadded leather from behind his back and passing it over.

She knew what it was before she'd begun unraveling it, and pulled it to her face, pressing it to her nose and inhaling. "It smells like him," she commented, grinning up at him.

"Yes, well… I suppose it would."

They shook hands amicably, grinning at each other halfway through and launching into a proper hug between friends.

"Don't need to remind you to take care of her," she said, stepping away and holding tightly to the bag's strap and her new leather parcel.

"No, you don't," he replied. He fingered the control next to the monitor. "Well," he said with a sigh, and then he gave her a grin that seemed to stretch from ear to ear. "Allons-y, my girl!" He flipped the switch.

And suddenly she was falling, only to be caught in such a familiar embrace that she nearly wept at the feeling. She and John stared at each other, emotions flitting back and forth without so much as a word, and though a part of her desperately missed her new friend from a universe over, that wonderful feeling of home, however mobile and unstable it could be, enveloped her and told her that now, after all these years, all was the way it should be.

"Not dead?"

"Nanogenes."

"Ah."

But before they even began to think about properly greeting each other as two friends who have been separated for so long, he dropped her to her feet, and they dashed to the monitor, hands clasped together naturally, to say a joyous hello and good-bye to the Doctor and Rose, who peered back at them with expressions that said whatever had to be done to bring them together again was more than worth the effort.

And Tardis found, that after nearly 20 years of separation, she could not take her eyes from her sister's face. Sobbing and speechless, she touched a hand to the monitor, over Rose's cheek. Rose immediately pressed her hand to the same area, and through a separation so thin between universes, the sisters had their reunion for the rest of time.

Tardis choked as she wept. Rose's face looked livelier, lovelier, and infinitely more at home than Tardis could ever remember. "Rose," she managed to whisper, and Rose's smile stretched more than one would think it could. Tardis's tears left cool trails down her cheeks and pooled on her lips in tiny, salty drops that she automatically swiped away with her tongue. "Are you happy?" she asked, laughing despite her tears.

Rose's eyebrows quirked in that compassionate line that Tardis had forgotten existed. Rose, a universe away, exuded exquisite feeling, almost knocking Tardis back with its strength and addictive power. "I was only happier the day you were born," Rose said firmly, voice quivering with tears of her own. The edges of the screen began to darken and fade away. She gave a little burst of laughter. "Now I guess we know why."

Tardis's tears filled her eyes until she could hardly make her sister out anymore. Her ecstasy at succeeding in what they all thought impossible turned bittersweet. The darkness had covered the Doctor's face completely, but she hardly noticed as she fought to clear her vision and soak in as much of her sister as she could. "R-Rose," she stuttered through choking sobs, and she did not know what she was pleading for.

Rose's smile turned sad. "Now then, let's see that smile," she coaxed, her voice crackling with static. All Tardis could manage was to turn the corners of her lips up. Rose smiled a bit more. "There we are. You know what I'm going to say, don't you, little Tardis?"

Tardis did not know when John had begun to hold her up, though later she would decide that he had never really let her go at all. Rose's mouth moved in those familiar words, and though John did not speak, Tardis heard his voice overlaying Rose's. "Have a good life. Do that for me, Tardis. Have a fantastic life." As she said those words, Rose's face disappeared completely from the monitor, her loving goodbye fading away as the connection was severed.

"She refused to leave without saying good-bye to your mum and Mickey. Even demanded to bid Pete farewell even though he wasn't her dad. You're the only one who didn't know where she'd gone all those years."

She only heard him vaguely over the roaring silence. She had spent her whole life working to bring Rose back to her Doctor; she couldn't remember feeling happier or more accomplished upon the completion of one of her many projects. But with the joy came the heavy, sickening, bottoming out of her world, and for the first time since she had woken up and realized that Rose had gone missing and wasn't coming back, Tardis felt the absolute loss that she had set aside.


	11. Smith and Tyler

Welcome to the end, loves. But then, of course, there will be the one-shots, which I hope you will all enjoy. They'll fill the story out so that you can get more of a sense for the characters and whatnot.

But yes, this is the end of the summary. Hope you enjoy it :)

* * *

The TARDIS faded, as the Doctor had said it would. When it was past the point of extendable life, they made their last trip home to London and left it, as John had once told Rose to do, as a funny little thing standing on a street corner near the Tyler estate. Though they visited it often, her lights eventually dimmed and it was too dark (and too dangerous, without her to guide you through the halls) for them to keep her proper company. Tardis insisted on a sleepover one night, but John, who had begun aging once the TARDIS appeared, soon complained that the grating was cutting into his back, and they'd had to give up.

So they gradually stopped visiting, merging back into a life in Torchwood. John's hair began to show the subtle signs of graying, but the domestic life was one that still irked the living daylights out of him.

Months later, it was a perfectly ordinary day. Tardis was arguing with Pete about the merits of installing a lift-entrance with a perception filter in the ceiling of the Cardiff Torchwood division, when John came running in. He had been gone, down in Wales on a field expedition to dig up a fallen meteor that had proven to be a bit more trouble and a bit more fatal than they'd anticipated. John skidded to a stop, narrowly avoiding barreling Pete over in his haste to brandish an orangish chunk of rock and grin triumphantly at Tardis. He looked younger. It wasn't so much that the grin and excitement took years from his face. It was that years had been taken from his face.

"Piece of Gallifrey," he declared, eyes snapping. "Must've been blasted over from the Time War. Probably what caused that weak spot that allows the Rift down in Cardiff. Reacts with my Time Lord DNA, revitalizes. I may not be able to regenerate, but it should slow my aging down just enough for you to catch up." Without waiting for a reaction, he continued, hinting, "Guess what else it does." His eyebrows went high, making his forehead wrinkle.

Time Lord, Gallifrey… Tardis barely gasped before she grasped his hand and took off at a full-out run.

It was a long run. They were both winded by the time they unlocked the doors of the TARDIS with trembling hands. A light switched on as soon as they stepped inside.

Wide-eyed and open-mouthed, Tardis turned to John. "How much of that have you got?"

He reached into the pockets of his old, beaten leather jacket and started removing Ziploc after Ziploc of orange rock, until there was a medium-sized mountain of it. He looked at Tardis, that old twinkle coming back to his eyes. "Where do you want to go first?"

Jackie always said she should have expected it, really, when she named her daughter Tardis. They came and went regularly. Time never meant the same thing to them as it did to the rest of the universe (even though one day it did catch up with them when they noticed the grey in their hair).

But there was one thing that they were always happy to do like everyone else – for once in his very, very long life, the Doctor was able to live life day after day. Just this once, it was an adventure that he could have.


	12. Dear Rose

**EXPLANATION:** The following chapters contain a collection of letters, one-shots, and just general adventures related to Tardis. As far as 'Tardis' is concerned, the official story is over. What follows is meant to fill out and elaborate on that story, but really, it all ends (or begins, depending on how you look at it) with the chapter 'Smith and Tyler.'

Without further, ado, the first of these, entitled **Dear Rose**. It was written right before Tardis heads through the Rift to test out the connection. When John picks Rose up, true to self, he wants to explain all the nitty gritty details. Rose, however, just wants to know what the crap is going on. She winds up frustrating John by refusing to listen to the details and instead asking for the big picture version. Thus, the scene in which Rose receives Tardis's letter would culminate in John jamming the letter into Rose's hand and then stalking off in a huff.

* * *

Dear Rose,

You once told me to 'go out there and do good.' I didn't realize for years how grammatically incorrect that was. John has suggested, though, that you knew exactly what you said, that you hadn't meant for me to do _well_ at all, but literally _good_. I'm still sure that whatever good you meant for me to do, you hadn't meant "find an echo of the Doctor in our universe, determine the reason for his existence, get your hands on your own TARDIS, figure out what the hell is up with the natural occurrences in the Rift, by any means possible, get me back to both my own universe and my own Doctor, and just generally dedicate your life to helping me." Still… that's how I've chosen to interpret it.

I've got about an hour left until the Rift fluctuates and I'll be on my way to what I hope is your universe. It exists right alongside ours as far as we know, though, so I'm not at all worried. John keeps snapping at me, twisting his hands around things too tightly, and he hasn't really spoken to me since I explained why it's got to be me that goes through first (and he's too logical a person to argue the point). Did he ever do that when you were with him? I'm sure you told me everything you knew about him, and the closest thing I can remember was when he took you back to be with your dad when he died, and you saved him instead.

Anyhow, I know you're probably traumatized just seeing John again. He does have that effect on people. Trust him, though. He'll be prone to frustration, so I told him to give you this letter instead of trying to explain it all himself. So, here goes:

What I mentioned above is the gist of it. I'm 20 years old, if you can believe that, and before you go off blaming John for sending me off on such a dangerous mission (which, I promise, we've been researching to death, and he'll love explaining that part), know this: I dedicated my life to you the day you disappeared when I was 4. I've been in Torchwood my whole life, so I promise I'm not ignorant by any means. I didn't meet John until 7 years ago (don't know how he doesn't age. He looks the same now as when he first arrived in this universe – he'll explain that too), and it's only been 3 since we started bringing out the Doctor in him. Needless to say, I know the man himself, and even without being the Doctor, he's still the most brilliant man you'll ever meet.

The whole point of this, Rose, is that we're getting you back to your Doctor. This will take you anywhere between a month to eighty-two years to accomplish. The reason I'm not with you is that I've gone ahead to make sure the transfer will work. Again, John will explain it. Trust him, Rose. The last thing he remembers of you is telling you that you are fantastic, and that's why he's helping now. That, and he's got enough of the Doctor in him to know that this is just what he does. In that regard, he still loves you very much, and will go to any lengths to protect you and make you happy.

Same reason I'm doing it, really.

I've got to go give him a hug and try to calm him down. Sometimes I think he might love me a bit too.

I wish I could see you in person again, but I'm afraid we'll pass each other up in the exchange. So this is my good-bye, I suppose.

You've always been the best big sister I could ask for. I love you!

Yours,

Tardis.

P.S. Did I mention that Mum slapped him?!

* * *

A/N: Reviews are greatly appreciated :) 


End file.
